Confessions made a lasting impact not just on the literary community but also on the medical community, since, for lack of a truly systematized study elsewhere, his literary account of opium use and addiction became the sole authoritative resource on the subject for many years. He channels the visions of his dreams into his writing, cementing the book as a seminal work of the period. He is a real philosopher on his own, but the opium he consumes intensifies his powers. In his 1821 memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar, essayist Thomas De Quincey, the famed “Opium-eater” himself, proudly attributes the superior power of his opium-infused dreams to his natural disposition. Sir Watson-Gordon National Portrait Gallery, London (waking or sleeping, day-dreams or night-dreams) is suitable to one who in that character, Whereas, in the case before him, the reader will find that the Opium-eater boasteth himself to be a philosopher Īnd accordingly, that the phantasmagoria of his dreams The probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all)-he will dream about oxen: If a man “whose talk is of oxen,” should become an Opium-eater, Thomas De Quincey and Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Opium as medicine and beyond January 31, 2017
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